Spurred by grass-roots activism aimed at lifting the stigma surrounding menstruation, the lawmakers are proposing measures to provide broad access to menstrual products for women. Their efforts include exempting tampons and pads from state and local taxes, compelling prisons to stop charging inmates for the supplies and making them available for free at public schools and workplaces.

“Last month, the federal government signaled its intention to roll back protections critical to the health, safety and welfare of vulnerable nursing home residents. The rule they want to eliminate bans the use of pre-dispute arbitration agreements. These agreements require older adults, people with disabilities and their families to waive their rights to the judicial system before a dispute even arises. Then, any dispute, even abuse or neglect, and regardless of how egregiously they’ve been harmed, is forced into secretive arbitration proceedings.”

Affirmative action ensures that women and minorities have equal access to educational opportunities and provide opportunities for women to enter nontraditional occupations. Yet ironically, since affirmative action was first implemented, “the people suing universities for discrimination in the academic admissions process have been white women,” according to researcher Jessie McDaniel in a 2014 report for the Racism Review.

History has proven that no one is going to protect, nurture, or advocate for Black women and girls but us— Not the Democratic Party to which we are more loyal than any other voting bloc. Not the school systems that suspend Black girls at alarming numbers. Not white feminists who often forget that we are women too. Not the patriarchal Black church that prospers on the backs of faithful sisters. Not the Black community that is still making excuses for one Mr. Robert Kelly and too many men just like him.

No respectable reader will trust the gender critiques of a man who is so incensed by company efforts to advance women in tech roles that he sinks hours of his own time into explaining why lady brains cannot execute the technical, high-pressure roles occupied by men at Google. But there is a sizable built-in audience for this kind of lament for the days when men were men and women just didn’t want to do man jobs. That audience is the men’s rights movement.

Thanks in part to the Beyoncé “We should all be feminists” shirts and to feminist Twitter, it’s finally becoming cool (as well as necessary) to identify as a feminist. At least that’s what a new, 2,000-person UM London survey suggests: A full 69 percent of British girls ages 13 to 18 answered “yes” to the question “Would you personally define as a feminist?” compared with just 46 percent of women overall.

Abortion is not controversial on the left. So what does it say that so many lefty men are willing to scrap it in an attempt to pander to some vague fantasy of a vast, disgruntled, anti-choice center? What kind of cringing, bewildered invertebrates roll over and capitulate to the losing side of a debate at a time when they’ve never had more leverage? What contortionist of logic came up with the proposal that alienating 75 percent of one’s constituents, and declaring half to not deserve control over their bodies, can strengthen a party’s numbers? This is not broadening our coalition; it’s flagrantly shrinking it.

Women make up the fastest-growing segment of incarcerated people in the U.S., and about half are in jails, where people are held before their trials, after violating the terms of their parole, or after being sentenced to less than a year in lock-up. Between 1970 and 2014, the country saw a 14-fold increase of the population of women in jails, mostly for low-level drug offenses, loitering, and other crimes associated with broken-windows policing. More than 8 in 10 women in jail have survived sexual violence; nearly as many have experienced domestic abuse. About one-third of women in jail are living with severe mental illnesses, more than twice the rate of men in jail.